and religion are acceptable. In his account of magic there at least
appears to be some confusion of thought. On the one hand, he says, 'it
must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put
forward by the magician, as such, is false; not one of them can be
maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.' This
pronouncement makes it easy for us to understand that even the savage
would eventually find magic an unsatisfactory method of gratifying his
desires, a deception in fact. On the other hand, Sir James apparently
contradicts himself, that is to say, he denies that every single
profession or claim put forward by the magician is false, and says,
'however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians
and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the
original institution of this class of man has, take it all in all, been
productive of incalculable good to humanity.' The ground for this second
pronouncement, so contradictory of the first, is that magicians, Sir
James tells us, 'were the direct predecessors, not merely of our
physicians and surgeons but of our investigators and discoverers in
every branch of natural science.' Thus, though he no longer regards
priests as transmogrified magicians, he does regard magicians as the
earliest men of science, and does regard science, therefore, as a highly
developed stage of magic. This view logically follows from the premisses
from which it starts; and if it is felt to be unacceptable, we shall
naturally be inclined to scrutinize the premisses once more and more
carefully. When we do so scrutinize them, we see that the principles of
thought on which Sir James Frazer assumes magic to be based are in
effect the principles from which science started: they are the beliefs
that like produces like--the basis of the law of causation--and that
things which our experience shows to have gone together in the past tend
always to go together--which is one way of stating our belief in the
uniformity of nature. If then these principles of thought are the